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CIA Learned in '02 That Bin Laden Had No Iraq Ties, Report Says
washingtonpost.com ^ | Friday, September 15, 2006 | Washington Post Staff Writer

Posted on 09/14/2006 11:21:17 PM PDT by endthematrix

The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Government; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: 200209; compost; curveball; drumheller; iraqalqaeda; libmyths; markpryor; marylandriew; sabri; tylerdrumheller
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1 posted on 09/14/2006 11:21:18 PM PDT by endthematrix
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To: endthematrix

Bush's CIA Critic Claim Exposed as Untrue http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1701834/posts

"Now it appears Drumheller's claim was untrue, according to the findings of a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation. Rather than undercutting the Bush administration's rationale for invading Iraq, Sabri's account shows how well-founded the intelligence on Saddam's weapons program appeared to be.

Ironically, just as Drumheller claimed that Bush ignored the truth about Iraq, the media have ignored the documentation in the Senate report demolishing Drumheller's claim."


2 posted on 09/14/2006 11:23:46 PM PDT by endthematrix (None dare call it ISLAMOFACISM!)
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To: endthematrix

Report from The Compost ........... almost as bad as The Slimes.


3 posted on 09/14/2006 11:24:51 PM PDT by beyond the sea ( How much freedom of speech you enjoy depends on who you insult.)
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To: endthematrix
A "highly restricted intelligence report" conveyed the source's claim that although Iraq had no nuclear weapon, Hussein was covertly developing one and had stockpiled chemical weapons, according to the committee members.
4 posted on 09/14/2006 11:27:30 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative (Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.)
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To: endthematrix

...and yet, Al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu al-Zarqawi was in Iraq from December 2002 until we killed him in June of 2006...

That little detail must be too trivial for the ComPost to bother highlighting.

5 posted on 09/14/2006 11:31:14 PM PDT by Southack (Media Bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
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To: endthematrix

The War on Terror begins with Democrats and the Liberal Media.

Terror is ineffective without the domestic sycophants and complicit political and media traitors.

Do your part: destroy Liberal Media and Democrats with extreme prejudice.


6 posted on 09/14/2006 11:32:17 PM PDT by Stallone (Dealing with Democrats IS the War on Terror.)
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To: Southack
...and yet, Al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu al-Zarqawi was in Iraq from December 2002 until we killed him in June of 2006...

While that's true, I think the more interesting topic is how many families of murder-bombers Saddam paid, and how many Americans those murder-bombers killed. But I won't hold my breath awaiting these facts to appear in the popular press.
7 posted on 09/14/2006 11:34:03 PM PDT by kingu (No, I don't use sarcasm tags - it confuses people.)
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To: endthematrix
Same old idiotic blather. If Saddam had succeeded in getting or developing a nuke, the libs and the MSM would have been all over the President for "ignoring the threat." The whole WMD thing has never been anything but puerile nagging and Monday-morning quarterbacking.
8 posted on 09/14/2006 11:34:58 PM PDT by JennysCool (Roll out the Canarble Wagon!)
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To: Southack

Abu al-Zarqawi was strictly there on a humanitarian mission. Just a coincidence that he has previously been in Afghanistan fighting the US and ended up in Baghdad.


9 posted on 09/14/2006 11:37:14 PM PDT by GOPyouth (De Oppresso Liber! The Tyrant is captured!)
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To: Alas Babylon!; American_Centurion; An.American.Expatriate; ASA.Ranger; ASA Vet; Atigun; ...
MI ping

Top Secret BOGUS...discovered and disseminated by WaPo..
10 posted on 09/14/2006 11:37:48 PM PDT by BIGLOOK (Keelhauling is a sensible solution to mutiny.)
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To: endthematrix

The CIA must just sit over there 24 hours a day and try and think of more ways they can screw the president.


11 posted on 09/14/2006 11:41:36 PM PDT by Ekoa
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To: endthematrix

Tyler Drumheller is the former chief of the CIA covert operations in Europe, who has said that the CIA had credible sources discounting weapons of mass destruction claims before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He received and discounted documents central to the Niger yellowcake forgery prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has also stated that senior White House officials dismissed intelligence information from his agency which reported Saddam Hussein had no WMD program.



List of political contributions by Drumheller

DRUMHELLER, TYLER S
VIENNA,VA 22182
BUSINESSMAN
6/9/2005
$500
Pryor, Mark

DRUMHELLER, TYLER S
VIENNA,VA 22182
5/11/2005
$300
Landrieu, Mary L

12 posted on 09/14/2006 11:46:42 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: endthematrix

So the Wilson lies didn't sink the Bush ship .. let's try a new mantra .. no ties between Sadaam and Osama .. WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN PROVEN TO EXIST.

The dems never learn. But .. the "Bush lied" must continue to be the drumbeat.


13 posted on 09/14/2006 11:52:11 PM PDT by CyberAnt (Drive-By Media: Fake news, fake documents, fake polls)
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To: JennysCool
The whole WMD thing has never been anything but puerile nagging and Monday-morning quarterbacking.

Worse than that. Much worse.

We did not go into Iraq only for the WMD thing nor mostly for the WMD thing.

We went into Iraq because Saddam grossly and flagrantly thumbed his nose at the terms of the Gulf War cease fire agreement. (UN Security Council Resolution 687). Strictly speaking, Operation Iraqi Freedom was a resumption of Desert Storm. The only real controversy, I think, is whether or not our Coalition of the Willing had the legal authority to move against Saddam under UN Security Council Resolution 1441, without an approving vote by the Security Council. (We did the right thing, IMHO)

14 posted on 09/14/2006 11:56:03 PM PDT by Racehorse (Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.)
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To: endthematrix
A year after retiring from the CIA, Tyler Drumheller, the agency’s former head of spying in Europe, tells CBS 60 minutes that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence leading up to the war with Iraq. “The idea of going after Iraq was US policy,” Drumheller says. “It was going to happen one way or the other. ... The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.” As an example, Drumheller notes how administration officials would accept single-sourced intelligence when it supported their views, but reject it as uncorroborated when it did not. [CBS News, 4/23/2006]

The real tragedy of this," Drumheller says, "is if they had let the weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition, which would have given us the 300,000 to 400,000 troops needed to secure the country after defeating the Iraqi army."

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, did not address Mr. Drumheller's accusations.

"Tyler Drumheller is a former employee expressing his personal opinions," Mr. Gimigliano said. "They are not the official views of the Central Intelligence Agency."



It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure. … This was a policy failure. … I think, over time, people will look back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time,” Drumheller tells Bradley.’

******

A portion of the recent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence investigation, which has been ignored by the mainstream media, debunks Drumheller’s claims. The report reads, in part: "Both the operations cable and the intelligence report prepared for high-level policy-makers [based on interrogation of the source] said that while Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear weapon, he was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon.

"Iraq was producing and stockpiling chemical weapons” and the Senate Report adds "The committee is still exploring why the former chief/EUR's [Drumheller’s] public remarks differ so markedly from the documentation."

15 posted on 09/15/2006 12:03:50 AM PDT by kcvl
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To: kcvl

Drumheller seems part of the "Shadow Government" that exists in the CIA/State Dept., regardless of whether he has resinged from the CIA. If this is linked to the Rockefeller memo and the DNC, interesting investigations might give Fitzgerald, or better yet someone honest, quite a bit to do.


16 posted on 09/15/2006 12:15:41 AM PDT by Richard Axtell
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To: endthematrix


...well of course the high ranking member of Saddam's cabinent is going to deny everything. We were talking about invading Iraq at the time...


17 posted on 09/15/2006 12:19:38 AM PDT by Tzimisce (How Would Mohammed Vote? Hillary for President! www.dndorks.com)
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To: endthematrix

Are they still rehashing two and three year old reports?

Found within the 9/11 Commission Report:

Page 61: Bin Ladin was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq,
even though Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist
agenda—save for his opportunistic pose as a defender of the faithful against
“Crusaders” during the Gulf War of 1991.

Page 66: There is also evidence that around this time Bin Ladin sent out a number
of feelers to the Iraqi regime, offering some cooperation. None are reported
to have received a significant response.

Page 72: An unfortunate consequence of this superb investigative and prosecutorial
effort was that it created an impression that the law enforcement system was
well-equipped to cope with terrorism. Neither President Clinton, his principal
advisers,the Congress, nor the news media felt prompted,until later, to press
the question of whether the procedures that put the Blind Sheikh and Ramzi
Yousef behind bars would really protect Americans against the new virus of
which these individuals were just the first symptoms.

Page 93: Cuts in national security expenditures at the end of the Cold War led to
budget cuts in the national foreign intelligence program from fiscal years 1990
to 1996 and essentially flat budgets from fiscal years 1996 to 2000 (except for
the so-called Gingrich supplemental to the FY1999 budget and two later,
smaller supplementals).These cuts compounded the difficulties of the intelligence
agencies. Policymakers were asking them to move into the digitized
future to fight against computer-to-computer communications and modern
communication systems, while maintaining capability against older systems,
such as high-frequency radios and ultra-high- and very-high-frequency (line
of sight) systems that work like old-style television antennas.Also, demand for
imagery increased dramatically following the success of the 1991 Gulf War.
Both these developments, in turn, placed a premium on planning the next generation
of satellite systems, the cost of which put great pressure on the rest of
the intelligence budget. As a result, intelligence agencies experienced staff
reductions, affecting both operators and analysts.

Page 358: Lacking a management strategy for the war on terrorism or ways to see how
funds were being spent across the community, DCI Tenet and his aides found
it difficult to develop an overall intelligence community budget for a war on
terrorism.

Responsibility for domestic intelligence gathering on terrorism was vested
solely in the FBI, yet during almost all of the Clinton administration the relationship
between the FBI Director and the President was nearly nonexistent.


18 posted on 09/15/2006 12:30:12 AM PDT by DakotaRed (The legacy of the left, "Screw you, I got mine.")
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To: endthematrix
i have been having a tit-for-tat with a co-worker over the AQ-Iraq connections. Recently, he was pointing to the senate report saying there were no meetings or ties (discounting 1 or 2 potential meetings). He also goes on about no WMDs found. I have countered saying bio shells have been found. his counter was to say that the shells were unusable. i countered by saying i spoke w/ people @ MacDill and they confirmed the shells were valid.. origin unknown. Could have been ours, but he discounts it.

In the end, there really needs to be definitive proof that AQ-Iraq were colluding.

Oh yea... and another thing I have heard from multiple lefties... the red states only vote GOP because (and they say this with a straight face).. they aren't educated enough. I would typcially ask if they could recommend any education camps this people could attend, and the reference is lost on them. More and more I am hearing how people that don't vote D are 'less intelligent' somehow.. and they only 'vote their values'.

The funniest part is, it's like its from a script. These people are all across the country (MA, CA, CO, and VA), yet they make the same remarks. It's just wierd and smacks of programming.

19 posted on 09/15/2006 1:10:43 AM PDT by sten
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To: endthematrix
Tyler Drumheller, who appeared on 60 Minutes in March and claimed that he had warned the administration that all their WMD information was wrong. In the additional views section Senators Pat Roberts , Orrin Hatch , and Saxby Chambliss stated that after watching 60 Minutes they were concerned they had missed something, so they went and look another look at the information. Their report directly contradicts Drumheller's . In the report they essentially called him a liar.

Also Tom Joscelyn has an excellent article over at the Weekly Standard's site on information the Senate Intelligence Committee managed to overlook in its bizarre haste to find no Iraq-Qaeda ties.Rules of Evidence The Senate report on Iraq and al Qaeda ignores everything which gets in the way of its conclusions. by Thomas Joscelyn

A cursory examination of Zarqawi's cell in Iraq reveals that many of his top operatives were once Saddam's military and intelligence officers.

neither Abu Zubaydah's nor Al-Masari's statements are given any weight by the committee. Nor did they bother to examine who it was, exactly, that Zarqawi was working with in Iraq. Not that any of this matters, of course. This report was never really about investigating the relationship between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/670bsucx.asp

20 posted on 09/15/2006 1:12:41 AM PDT by anglian
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